Twitter has no Principles

People are talking about the “white nationalist purge” of Twitter, which I honestly care little about. Those who are followers of the blog know that the Alt-Right hates me more than most because I have done as much as I have to literally teach people how to inoculate themselves from their rhetoric.

But Twitter honestly get’s no credit in this one. While it’s fine if they want to silence these types of people, it isn’t fine if they refuse to silence fanatics on other fronts. Twitter has long been host to organizing and empowering groups that support terrorism from the Islamic State to Anti-fa, so to suddenly take a stand now and expect praise for it, sorry, you’ll get none from me. When you only silence people who you specifically find detestable, but refuse to take action against far worse among people who violate your own rules but are politically incorrect to hold them accountable… we have a saying for that.

They have no principles.

This was outlined clearly with the banning of Roger Stone back in October. I wrote about it on Quora then and will share it again here. You can say that they did the right thing by enforcing some standard of decency on the platform. I’ll agree. I hate seeing the dumbing down of all media that eventually led everyone throwing around “F-this” and “F-that” on the nightly news or even Star Trek. I really hate it. I think what he said was important enough to be said, but a completely terrible way to say it.

That said, Twitter still has no principles… because you don’t get to only enforce the rules on ideologies you don’t like.

Or how about the real head-scratchers, people with millions of followers who can get away with murder… provided that they are targeting the right people. Or, should I say… people on the Right.

Habitually.

And it isn’t just President Trump. Olbermann does this sort of thing all the time to many, many people. Twitter does nothing about these cases which are reported again, and again, and again.

So the message that Twitter is sending out, clearly is that they won’t respect targeted abuse, but they will only enforce that policy on right-wingers when they start imitating the left-wingers who have made their careers off it.

So having said that, Twitter deserves nothing but condemnation for this move. Suspending Roger Stone is something I would be totally fine with… if he was the only one acting like he does. If he set this bar so low, then I would say that the punishment was fair. Since he’s not, not even the worst, and since Twitter regularly proves itself to be such an irrefutably biased platform, then no, this is a complete mockery of the site.

Look, everyone understands fairness. Everyone. You don’t get to suddenly come down and start enforcing the rules… but only for the right people. I should say, only for the right-wingpeople. It shows absolutely no integrity on the platform to demonstrate their principles, but making clear the only principles they have are partisan loyalty. Look, I’m fine with suspending people acting like dirtbags… but suspend all the dirtbags.

Fair isn’t fair if you only treat people you hate “fairly”.

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